Have you ever lined up a set of browser tabs of pages to want to read, but before you got to them, had to close your browser? Or, have you wanted to close the browser to free up resources but hesitated because it would close the tabs you lined up? It’s annoying that there is no way to restore that content so you can pick it up later.
This immediately leads to a quick idea to steal: Give the option of saving and restoring all content when the browser is re-opened.
This scenario hints at something larger, an observation that browser makers seem to have missed: The pile of tabs can be thought of as a reading list. What if web browsers let you create reading lists, like music playlists in iTunes, but for web pages? You could drag the current page or a tabs into a reading list to read later, or to save it forever. You might have a reading list for sports, one for humor, one for macrame.
This concept is different from web bookmarks: it is the content that is stored locally, not just the page’s location. The benefits are convenience, speed, permanence and searchability.
You could have multiple reading lists, just as there are multiple play lists in iTunes.
Reading lists are designed for transience. Once a page is read, it is discarded, to keep the focus on unread material. This differs from typical bookmark managers, which typically make you switch to a bookmark management mode to clean up bookmarks.
Sometimes there are pages you want to keep forever as reference or for a historical record. There is no guarantee that the company serving the page will still be in business ten years from now, with the article still available for free and at the same location you bookmarked. The New York Times, for one, expires its articles pretty quickly. The user has the option of storing pages indefinitely, as a permanent archive.
Academic or scientific researchers, reporters and students would use this to collect read articles over time the way a reporter collects boxes of newspaper clippings.
The saved content within reading lists would be indexed and searchable from within the browser, making it easier to recall a useful article from the past.
Reading lists would help with mobility. Before traveling you could load up on readings for future offline browsing on an airplane, or anywhere else the Internet don’t shine. This is better than leaving your browser open with a lot of tabs — a running browser trickles off some CPU load and therefore battery life.
Engadget or SlashDot are examples of pages that have the useful content on the home page. You rarely have to drill in further. While pages in the reading list are normally static, for this scenario, the user might designate a page as automatically refreshed. They would update automatically in the background and thus be instantly available when called upon. Their freshness level would be clearly indicated so you always have a sense of how old the material is. In the airplane scenario, pre-caching would save you from having to remember to load up on content beforehand and to spend frantic packing time doing so.
The latest RSS feeds would be available instantly and automatically, even when offline.
Pre-caching reading lists would be a boon for mobile users. Today’s iPhone, for example, has poor digital bandwidth, making surfing painful. And even the fastest wireless networks aren’t available everywhere, such as in a subway tube or in a different geography. Reading lists would work with mobile devices in a couple of ways. First, reading lists you line up on your desktop would be kept in constant sync with the handheld. Stuff you didn’t have time to read at your desk is therefore available to you on the train or in the waiting room.
Secondly, the mobile device could load up piles of subscribed web pages, RSS feeds and video snippets while charging, so it doesn’t incur a hit to battery life. If the device has WiFi like the iPhone, it could make use of it for faster fill-ups. Then when you have a spare moment, calling up the pre-cached pages would be instantaneous.
This new capability is not much of a technical stretch over what browsers already do. It is already possible in most browsers to save a page locally in the file system. This concept provides a more streamlined and integrated experience for saving, grouping and recalling locally stored pages.
This is one of those ideas that could have been created years ago. The last major innovation in web browsers was tabbed browsing. Hopefully, we will see browser makers incorporate an elegant design of reading lists some time soon.
[If you know someone involved in browser technology, please send them this article!]
[Update 9/7/07: OmniWeb v5 seems to have some of this functionality in a feature they call Workspaces. It seems to have much in common with this idea, but a different bent, more oriented to reconstructing configurations of tabbed window browers.]
yes! i actually use firefox with the restore tab sessions on and the google browser sync plugin, so i can choose to syn those tabs to my other machines (running firefox and the google plugin). i cant liv (or at least browse) without it.
incidentally, google browser sync also syncs passwords, history, cookies and bookmarks (i use magnolia though), along side your open tabs, so you can pick up your browsing where you left off from any machine you use.